PS4 teardown reveals no adhesive, very easy hard drive access

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The PS4 isn’t even a day old yet, but iFixit managed to get their hands on a launch unit and didn’t waste any time playing games on the machine. Instead they took it apart, and based on an 8 out of 10 score for repairability, they seem pretty happy with what Sony has manufactured.

The good news is, there’s no adhesive used at all in the console. Everything is secured in place using screws and there’s no tricky disassembly in terms of remembering which bit goes where. More importantly, the hard drive is really simple to replace. You slide off a section of the plastic casing, undo one screw, and slide out the 2.5-inch SATA 500GB drive. You can replace it with either another hard drive or SSD, with the only restrictions being a size no smaller than 160GB, and a drive no thicker than 9.5mm.

If you want to delve deeper than the hard drive, you’ll need a Security Torx screwdriver to access the main components, as well as removing a few stickers. Why would you want to open up your PS4? Well, iFixit says that because the power supply is inside the machine, you’re going to have to open it up if you want to clean the fan, otherwise there’s no way to effectively clear the dust out.

There really isn’t any big surprises inside the PS4. The 85mm fan assembly is interesting, but as we have seen from Sony’s own teardown, everything is nice and spaced out on the board, with the cooling seemingly effective while being much smaller than the Xbox One. As for the heatsink, there’s no chance of you damaging the underside or displacing it as it seems to be welded to the EM Shielding.

So the PS4 is easy to open, there’s nothing really to get in your way beyond those Torx screws, and with an easy hard drive replacement process, the console is future proofed in terms of storage.

One note iFixit did make was with regards to some PS4 units not outputting any video. It turns out there’s a fault on some of the HDMI ports where a section of metal that should have been flush, isn’t. That in turns leads to damage happening to the HDMI wire, hence the lack of a video signal.